"They reduced it from assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder, to simple assault, and I grabbed at the chance."
"Get any fee?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"That was a charity case," he said. "After all, you couldn't blame the woman; she'd been goaded beyond human endurance. She didn't have any money and she didn't have any friends."
Della Street stared at him in smiling appraisal, her eyes warm.
"You would," she said.
"Anything new?" he asked.
"Paul Drake has been trying to get you on the telephone. He wants you to call just as soon us you come in."
"All right," Perry Mason said, "get him on the line. Anything else?"
"Just a lot of routine," she said, "I've made a memo on your desk. The Drake call is the only one that's important. Bradbury has called a couple of times, but I think he's just trying to find out how the case is going."
"Be sure," Perry Mason said, "that he doesn't get me on the line until after I've talked with Paul Drake."
He walked through to the inner office and had no sooner seated himself at the desk than the telephone rang. He scooped the receiver to his ear and heard Paul Drake's voice:
"I've got the dope on Frank Patton, Perry," said the detective. "That is, I'm going to have it by eight o'clock tonight; perhaps a little before. Can I run in and tell you about it?"
"Okay," Mason said. "Just stay on the line a moment."
He clicked the receiver rest with his finger until he heard Della Street 's voice.
"You on the line, Della?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Paul Drake's on the line," he said. "He's going to run in to tell me about this Bradbury matter. He thinks he's got the information that we want. It's important that no one disturbs me until I've finished with Drake. That means, particularly, that I don't want to talk with Bradbury."
"Okay, chief," she said.
"Come right on up," Mason told Drake, and slid the receiver back into place.
Two minutes later, Paul Drake pushed his way through the door to Perry Mason's private office.
"What have you got?" asked the lawyer.
"I think I've got the thing sewed up," Paul Drake said, dropping into the big leather chair and lighting a cigarette. "I've found out that fellow Patton put on the same sort of a racket in Parker City. The peculiar thing is that he didn't use an alias. That is, he pulled the same racket in Parker City and gave his name as Frank Patton. The motion picture company that signed the contract was the same as the one that figured in the Cloverdale contract."
"Who did he hook in Parker City?" asked Perry Mason curiously.
"The same outfit—the Chamber of Commerce and the merchants."
"No, that isn't what I mean. Who was the girl that got gypped?"
"That's where we're going to get our lead on Patton," the detective said. "She's a girl named Thelma Bell, and she's living here in town. We've got her address and telephone number. She's living at the St. James Apartments, a cheap apartment at 962 East Faulkner Street, and the telephone number is Harcourt 63891. She's got apartment 301, but she's out right now. We've been telephoning and trying to get in touch with her. We've got evidence that leads us to believe she's keeping in touch with Frank Patton."
"When can you get in touch with her?" Mason asked.
"Around eight o'clock some time. She's working somewhere, I don't know just where. She's been in chorus work, and I gather that she may be a bit hardboiled. She won the leg contest in Parker City and came on here with a picture contract, the same as Marjorie Clune had. When she found out she was stung, she went into chorus work and has done some posing as an artist's model."
"And she's kept in touch with Frank Patton?" asked Perry Mason, frowning.
"Yes, apparently she's the kind of a kid that takes things as they come. She figured that Patton was running a racket and couldn't be blamed for that. She put it up to him to do the best he could for her here in the city. That's the way we figure it out, according to the story we get from the girl's friends."
"And she's going to be in around eight o'clock tonight?" Mason asked.
"Yes, perhaps a little before that."
"And you think she'll give us Frank Patton's address?"
"I'm certain she will. I've got a good man waiting to catch her as soon as she comes in. He can hand her a line about wanting to keep other girls from being lured to the city by false promises and all that sort of stuff."
"Well," Perry Mason said, pulling a Marlboro from the desk humidor, "that's swell."
"Oh, no, it isn't," the detective said. "Not yet."
"How do you mean?"
"I want to know," Paul Drake said, "exactly what you're going to do when we've located Frank Patton."
Perry Mason faced Paul Drake with an expression that was grim as granite.
"When I find that man," he said slowly, "I'm going to break him."
"Just how are you going to break him?"
"I don't know," Perry Mason said. "The element of surprise is going to enter into it in some way. You understand, Paul, that this racket he's pulling may be on the up and up, and again it may not be. It's a question of intent.
"Now, that's where all criminal prosecutions break down. District attorneys get frightened to death to take a case where they've got to prove the element of fraud or an intent to defraud. It's an element of the crime. Therefore it has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. It's hard enough to establish what's in a man's mind by evidence of others, let alone to establish an intent beyond a reasonable doubt.
"Therefore what I want out of this man is a confession. I want to force him to betray himself; to admit that the whole thing is a racket; that his intent from start to finish is to defraud the merchants with whom he is doing business and the girl who is given the phony picture contract. In order to do that, we've got to crash in and surprise him. We've got to get him off his guard and rush him off his feet before he gets a chance to figure just how much of our talk is bluff and how much of it we can prove."
"And I take it we don't want Bradbury there?"
Perry Mason stared steadily at Paul Drake.
"Get this, Paul," he said. "We don't even want J.R. Bradbury to know anything about what we're doing."
The telephone on his desk rang.
Perry Mason picked up the receiver.
Della Street 's voice said cautiously, "J.R. Bradbury is calling. He says that he's found out you've left the court house for your office and that he's coming over unless he can talk to you on the telephone.